Lionel Robbins on how inflexible wage rates created unemployment during the Great Depression

If it had not been for the prevalence of the view that wage rates must at all costs be maintained in order to maintain the purchasing power of the consumer, the violence of the present depression and the magnitude of the unemployment which has accompanied it would have been considerably less…. A policy which holds wage rates rigid when the equilibrium rate has altered, is a policy which creates unemployment.

~ Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (1934)